So, I revived the "shelf" section, where I post my toys; Updated it with an animation written in JavaScript. I might write some more animations and put them on here. The animation generates a predetermined number of "stars", and makes them have the colors present in an array (you can change the amount of colors by changing the array in the big file; the smaller is not flexible) and gives them some vector so they go bouncing from the walls.

The stars can't collide with each other, and energy isn't gained or lost; to ensure that, I never change the any stars' vector's magnitude, only its orientation.

The competition was intense.A recommendation to everyone participating in programming contests which evaluate the speed of the code: do not use Java.

The nuisances we can ignore in everyday development when favoring a reduction in coding time while sacrificing speed in runtime can not be ignored safely. It is extremely easy to get your code rejected by a "Time Limit Exceeded" error.

Java's performance issues caused my team no end of grief, and hampered our progress throughout most of the competition. Then, after the scoreboards had been frozen, I (who was in charge of writing the algorithms) lost it. So I opened gedit (and closed Eclipse) and a vty running bash, and went into a coding spree.

Unfortunately, that happened near the end of the competition, after unhealthily indulging in optimizing Java code. Well, the same code, in C, no optimization needed, ran successfully. One of the judges stated that the fact that we coded the solution in gedit and debugged with gdb was impressive.

I think I was desperate, didn't want to let my team, college and country down, and panicked. As it usually happens to people when the panic, I went to my happy place: I was, mentally, in my house, coding with no IDE: just gcc, gdb, a text editor, and me. And so it is that we had a successful submission.

I'm sorry to say we had no time to submit the other solutions we'd worked out, which is really sad because we'd have had a better standing.

But this was a fruitful experience in many ways. The most understandable one is, I think, that next year we will pointedly not code in Javaunless limitations in C (or maybe in C++, the team has yet to decide which we are learning) would make the implementation really long and painful, or at least severely error prone.

Fortunately, we have a year to prepare for the competition, which is about thrice the time we had to prepare this time around. Unfortunately, it's possible that one of the members of the team won't be able to compete next year for the happy reason that he's graduating.

If that's the case, we'll have to find a new person worthy of being in the happy, dynamic and ever optimist trio, "New Folder".

Alberto Estrella, Melvin González, thank you for your seriously large supply of patience, and for the laughs. It was, as it usually happens with ITESA graduates, a fun time. You're a great team to work with.

Maybe I'll post some anecdotal accounts of our stay in Cuba later on, but that remains unclear. There will be pictures available in Google Plus and probably in Facebook, too. Those might inspire me.

There's a person who publishes how to move form Xubuntu, Ubuntu and Lubuntu to Kubuntu painlessly.As in Ubuntu 11.10 the sane GNOME 2.x desktop was banished, I found it necessary to move.

LXDE may be lightweight, but I didn't feel too comfy in it. I've not been a KDE fan: we started our relationship with the wrong foot.

In any case, I moved to KDE. You can customize his scripts to only remove a Desktop Environment by removing the last part of the long, long command: "&& sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop", so if you moved to LXDE or Xfce, you can remove all trace of the bloaty GNOME 3.x desktop that the people at Canonical seem to support.

This is the first time I've participated in a Programming contest, and I'm faring well.My team placed third in the national competition, the regional preliminaries. In November we'll compete in the Caribbean Region contest, and then we'll see. The competition looks pretty tough from here, and there is a huge gap between the first, second and third places in the contest I was a part of, so the hope that we'll go through to the next level is pretty slim.

I think this is good, given that the ACM restricts students to 2 Finals or 5 Regional contests; we'll be spending one of our Regional chances, but will have chance to prepare for the Finals better. If somehow we were to pass on to the Finals right now, and I'm just being realistic here, we'd lose.

We'll try our best, however. Having a good placing among four or five countries is good enough for me. A nice experience anyways. I'll try and take pics, "or it didn't happen", as they say. There are some on Facebook and some on Google +, but I think those can't be seen by everyone. Try to if you want to. Pictures and video titles are of the "competencia nacional de programación" or "después de la competencia nacional de programación" sort.

Hello. I'm looking for an alternative to the software offered at prezi.comIt's very nice for college presentations, but I dislike its closedness. And its pricing, too. I like free stuff.Anyone knows of one, let me know. Interested in building one? Let me know.

I've set up aplatanaos.wordpress.com along with other people, a blog about Technology, art, games, geeky news in general and a bit of crazy.Why? Not enough of that in Spanish! In English we've wired and BoingBoing, and Makezine and LinuxJournal and FreeSoftwareMagazine and a ton of good content sites.

In Spanish we've to settle for FayerWayer, and personal blogs of techies who might or might not have a good grasp of writing, and more often than not cover only focused topics, not the wide variety that could be offered.

So, to start, we're doing news on interesting topics and calling people's attention to good (techie) material, BoingBoing-style. We're still getting up to speed, but we'll soon be covering gaming news, and from then on... well, time will tell, but it'd be great to have a good geeky site, spanning many interests and topics, in Spanish.